Chilean engineered app mixes e-commerce and social media

Designed in Chile, the new smartphone app Vendly has already been met with rapid-fire international success.

Vendly is an innovative social network specifically geared towards the sale of products. By simply snapping a shot of the item you hope to sell, the item is entered onto your profile and appears in a timeline seen by your contacts within the network or through the app’s search function.

“In three simple steps you’re already selling,” co-founder of the app Alan Nudman said. “You take a picture of the product, write a description of it, and you share it.”

Just as you might “retweet” something on Twitter, a member can “revend” an item, having it appear on their own profile. If one user’s “revend” leads to a sale, they are eligible for a commission on the sale of the item.

A user’s Vendly updates can also be shared through other social networking platforms like Twitter or Facebook in order to maximize the amount of exposure an item gets.

After just over three months, 7,000 users have downloaded the app. The company says that the amount of users doubles each month. Of the registered users, 60 percent come from the U.S., 35 percent from Chile, and the remaining 5 percent hail from China and Spain.

In the app’s short history, technology and baby products have proved to be the most highly bought and sold items.

Nudman and his two partners Andres Gottleib and Alan Strauss began thinking of the idea for Vendly when they realized that the Facebook social network was being used for online commerce. They even admitted to being irked when friends would tag them in pictures of items for sale.

“We know each other from high school but around a year ago we reunited and started discussing how irritating it was that people tagged you in Facebook to sell their products. This is how we realized that e-commerce hasn’t been able to adapt to the people’s needs to sell and buy products,” Strauss told TechCrunch. “This is why we decided to create Vendly as an instrument to allow users to buy and sell through an app specially designed for these purposes.”

Thanks to its favorable economic climate and laws that are helping new businesses, Chile has been home to many start-up companies like Vendly. Chile’s groundbreaking government funded program Start-Up Chile also provides funding to new business ventures from around the world.